Winning in the Age of Bohonomics

Archive for the category “movements”

Jari Kaivo-oja (Research Director, Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku School of Economics, University of Turku)

“Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things. It is the foundation our culture and society. While civilizations come and go, science grows steadily onward. It does this by watching itself.” – https://edge.org/conversation/speculations-on-the-future-of-scienceRise of the Robots is a landmark book which continues the provocative analyses of Lights in the Tunnel of Martin Ford (2009).

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford gives us new and updated arguments to the discussion of technological revolution we are facing today everywhere, in the US, in the Euro zone and in the BRICS countries. Not only developed post-industrial countries rely on advanced robotics – but also developing countries are adopting new AI and robotics solutions. Only few eminent thinkers think about the futures of corportions and nations after rise of robots. Fortunatelly – we have eminent scholar and engineer Martin Ford to think forward. Technological foresight analyses tell that next 15-20 years are meaning enormous and disruptive changes in our economies and business networks. The threat of jobless future and massive technological unemployment are real and evidence-based. Only the very fool conventional neoclassical economist doubts it.

System modeler Martin Ford provides a lot of empirical evidence from US, which indicate not marginal changes but massive technological disruptions in the US economy. Martin Ford continues the tradition of John Maynard Keynes in his discussion about technological unemployment. He also continues the tradition of Joseph Schumpeter in his discussion of disruptive technological changes (McKinsey Global Institute 2013) . Martin Ford has now updated these classical analyses to meet the grand challenges of today and tomorrow. We must give full respect to him.

AI and robotics are making “good jobs” obsolete and vanishing. Smart software, robots and AI-based solutions replace many white-collar jobs. Paralegals, journalists, office workers, teachers, health care professionals and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by disruptive technological innovations. Autonomous robotics and swarm robotics change many service architectures and service designs. Key change – identified by Martin Ford is that a tight relationship between wages and productivity does not hold any more in the US economy. This is a dangerous phenomenon for the future welfare of people. Robotics is not a novel issue in the economic history. In industries and agriculture there have been a lot of robots and automation solutions. All we know the Luddites discussion and Race Against Machine analyses of Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) (http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-ebook/dp/B005WTR4Z ).

Now newest thing is the emergence of service robotics. We can see many service robotics innovations in health care, hotel and recreation industries, retailing, and libraries – and in many other service sectors. Personally, I think that Mr Martin Ford is absolutely right when he notes that we are moving towards a new economic paradigm of smart machines. He is not in bad company, because there are such research fellows like Ray Kurzweill and Michio Kaku, who think in similar way. Personally, I respect these eminent research fellows. It is also good to remember that Gardner Inc notes that “CIOs must start considering how to develop ethical programming for smart machines”. Realizing the potential of smart machines and AI — and ensuring successful outcomes for the businesses and societies that rely on them — will hinge on how trusted smart machines are and how well they maintain that trust. The trust matters. Central to establishing this trust will be ethical values that people recognize and are comfortable with. Transparency of rise of the robots will be needed.

There will be need to develop policies and social innovations which recognize disruptive innovations and their impacts on industries and services. As Martin Ford says we need transformation of higher education, new thinking in the health care sector, new industrial Industry 4.0 strategies (as Germans say it), national robotics strategies (like From Internet to Robotics, 2013) and new kind of consumer politics. We need also new social innovations for the super-intelligence solutions and for the singularity. Radical innovations cannot be managed by incremental innovations. More fundamental new ideas and inventions will be needed. These ideas must go beyond crazy year of 1848 (see De Maesschalck 2005 and http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/888/). We are busy now to respond to these “old challenges of capitalism”. New capitalism needs BohoBusiness (2015) thinking if we want to be honest to ourselves.

It is interesting to compare our recent book BohoBusiness – Winning in the Age of Bohonomics with Martin Ford´s outstanding book Rise of the Robots. Our book shares many similar themes with Martin Ford´s book. In our book key theme is a question: What human beings should do in the conditions of disruptive changes? Our approach to question is linked to the analyses of learning, bohemian attitude, flexible radical organization culture, role of human creativity and social innovations. These issues are vital in the conditions of radical and disruptive changes. We are also discussion much about global trends and associated changes. In this context the ownership and distribution of wealth are not marginal issues. For example, creating a learning and creative hybrid economy in the conditions of robotics will be a very challenging social and cultural issue. Our book provides some new fresh insights to this broad old challenging issue.

Probably a biggest issue in robotics debate will be the question: “How are we organizing society when too many people are coming into the labor market and too many machines are throwing people out?”. Our sincere answer is focused on self-organization of individuals, organizations and institutions of capitalism, because we rely on the learning capacity of capitalism. First pre-condition for this kind of self-organization is, of course, future awareness. Both Martin Ford´s book (2015) and our book (2015) have already now improved future awareness of many people and decision-makers. We need more political and economic decision-makers who understand complex social problems like robotics and AI driven society. However, a new economic paradigm is not automatically developed. We know quite well this societal challenge. One can just study the current storyline of post-modern Greece and its economy to understand this.

I just was an expert in the EU OSHA Bilbao conference in Bilbao, Spain in May 2015, where the official delegate member of Greece explained to me in EU OSHA workshop session what robotics means for Greece. I was informed that it means cosmetics robotics in isolated islands for them and they were very happy with this strategic economic growth approach. In the session, the German delegate explained to me much more comprehensive program of the robotics strategy in German economy. To conclude …. pre-conditions on robotics matter – whether it is in the U.S. or China – just to mention it for curiosity. Of course, I know that US strategy “From Internet to Robotics” (2013) is a smart strategy and Ford focuses on it. Smart action from him, indeed. To sum up … the real character of corporations and organizations still matters. Organizations´ culture can make or break their existence and business. We still need visionaries and change makers. In many cases they are radical and bohemian game changers. In BohoBusiness we propose an unholy partnership: bohemian individuals and organizations combined with smart machines.

How to handle decision making in the management teams? In many companies’ management and leadership processes seem to work well, but suddenly something surprising happens. In spite of many cross-checks and meetings, things turn into a non-expected direction. All think that everything was in place … but then something emerges and business plans are outdated in a day. Why this happens?

It is typical than there are always some biases in management teams of companies. It is typical that for individuals it is not easy to make question marks on official agreements and strategies. Even though all nod in agreement and look happy it is not easy to say something critical. “It was settled” or “we all agreed” are typical notes on the memos of companies in this kind of decision situations.

Raising dissenting voice is not easy – especially when the chief boss decides something. It is much easier to be among “yes-sayers” than among “critical questioning men”. Self-fulfilling prophecy is the tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results that will (consciously or subconsciously) confirm our beliefs. “Yes men” cause self-fulfilling prophecies. There can be also a halo effect, the tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one area of their personality to another in others’ perceptions of them.

In many case studies of management processes, some typical mistakes have been identified. First, there is tendency to devote attention only to those events seen as most likely. Secondly, once the team of decision makers had made up its mind as to what was going to happen, even conclusive information that the decision was poor did not change the prediction and associated decision. Thus there is typically a problem of groupthink in management teams. One reason for this problem is homogenous social and cultural backgrounds.

Often management teams have similar backgrounds: university degree holders, men with similar hobbies, career paths, middle-class people, and homogenous values. False consensus effect means the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them. Sometimes there can be anchoring decision-making biases, where there is the tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

Another problematic issue in management teams is overcoming overconfidence. The future looks assured for them. Their judgments are made with deep confidence. However, people may feel confident that they do know the right answer but actually don´t. They don´t know they don´t know. Other options of knowing are: (1) They do know they know; (2) they don´t know they do know and (3) they do know they don´t know. Obviously the best option would be to know that they know. In reality this option is not often available for a management team.

Third typical bias of a management team is a confirmation bias. What it means? It means that we don´t place ourselves in situations where we can test the quality of our judgment. We want to seek that information that will confirm the quality of our predictions and decisions. It is quite human character of people, wanting to be in right – winning team. In this way we are selective in our observations.

Fourth bias in management teams, is so called hindsight bias, which is connected to our readiness not learn from experiences. In general, we don´t learn from experience because experience has little to teach us. That is why our recollections of our judgmental predictions confirm these to have been accurate. Some call this bias “I-know-it-all-along-effect”. Thus, our judgments are rooted to history and it cause biases to emerge.

Fifth bias can emerge because we rely on expert predictions too much. We can call this bias as an expert bias. Also experts can cause group thinking bias and other people may suffer from this kind of bias. There are many other kinds of biases, too like randomness bias, sunk-cost bias, self-serving bias and escalation and commitment bias. Projection bias is close expert opinion bias. It is the tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.

Sixth bias, randomness bias means that there is a tendency people have to seek patterns where none exist and to invent the existence of unjustified causal relationships. It is the tendency of people to make sense out of events which are so random in nature that not enough should be read into them. Close to randomness bias is Gambler´s fallacy, the tendency to assume that individual random events are influenced by previous random events.

Seventh type of bias, sunk-cost bias is often connected to too optimistic thinking. Sunk-costs are costs that cannot be recovered once they have been incurred. Sunk-costs bias greatly affects the decisions, because humans are inherently loss aversive and thus normally act irrationally when making economic decisions.

Eight type of bias, self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control. The term, “self-serving bias”, is used to describe a pattern of biased causal inference, in which praise or blame depend on whether success or failure was achieved in reality.

Ninth type bias, escalation and commitment bias means tendency to invest additional resources in an apparently losing proposition, influenced by effort, money, and time already invested. The term is also used to describe poor decision-making in business, government, information systems in general. Escalations and commitment biases are typical in software project management, in politics, and in addictive gambling. To sum up: there are 9 key sources of bias in management teams:

It is good to be aware of these potential decision making biases in decision making situations. We could avoid these typical biases, if we were aware of these potential biases. The lessons from history can tell us that many management teams do not identify these biases and serious management failures happen. A sad truth is that we don’t always learn from experiences. There are very many historical lessons available for decision makers but we should learn something from these old lessons. From this perspective “learning organization” is a modern myth.

There is need to question some issues (and biases) in many management teams. That why bohemian persons and “out of box” thinkers may be very valuable members in management teams. It is easy to say that we should be free of biases, but in reality we are often slaves of biases and fallacies. Only personal and critical reflections can help us to be free from these biases. Open and critical discussions in management teams should be encouraged and supported too. Daily illusions about effective control should be avoided in all the decision-making situations and processes.

In philosophy authenticity is a technical term in existentialist philosophy. The term of authenticity is also used in the philosophy of art and psychology. From this perspective it is easy to connect to bohemian culture. Most people keep the bohemians as people with high level of authenticity. Why?

One answer can be presented by philosopher Charles Taylor, who argues in his book “The Ethics of Authenticity” that all humans have a natural feeling to tell the difference between right and wrong. Taylor discusses in his famous book about the big idea of getting in touch with your inner self to find your true self identity. In the life shape of human beings people try to keep touch with their inner true self identity. Inner virtues are crucial for the ethics of authenticity. Today modern psychology views authenticity as integral to well-being.

Charles Taylor states that trying to listen to the inner-self may be very difficult because of own social dependence on others. If we continue to depend on other people, the voice of our inner nature will be drowned out and we become oriented un-authentically. We can lose ourselves and lose bohemian attitude. Also social pressures of middle-class culture or average behavioral norms can lead people to inauthentic ways of living. Heidegger in his later life associated authenticity with non-technological modes of existence, seeing technology as distorting a more “authentic” relationship with the natural world.

In conventional philosophical thinking, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very different from, and other than, unique itself. Thus, authenticity is the degree to which one is true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character, despite these external social and cultural pressures. In the art an authentic signature is telling to us about undisputed origin or genuine authorship. An authentic account is telling to us about accuracy in representation of the facts, about trustworthy work and about reliability. In bohemian culture authentic signatures and authentic accounts are issues of pride.

Being in touch with our inner voice is very important because it tells us what the right thing to do is. In bohemian culture this kind of attitude is very important, because in many biographies of bohemian persons the biggest struggles of them have often been internal struggles to be true to one´s own personality and character. Often a lack of authenticity is considered to be bad faith. Even an unpleasant truth is valued in bohemian culture.

One of the greatest problems facing such abstract approaches like authenticity is that the often culture bound. Objectivity of one´s inner voice cannot be evaluated easily. Maybe that is a reason why bohemian people are often seen as ultra-subjective and ambient persons seeking ultimate freedom. On the other hand bohemians are seen as real and original persons, not playing social role games. Inside bohemian culture, non-authenticity or un-authenticity are not appreciated.

A key element of creative work is storytelling. Today many media channels are interconnected. In the future media channels are even more linked and interconnected because of ubiquitous technologies, machines and robots. Trans-media storytelling is a technique of telling novel stories across multiple formats and platforms. Trans-media storytelling is also known in some communication contexts as multi-platform storytelling, cross-platform storytelling, or trans-media narrative. Ubiquitous technologies make this kind of trans-mediation possible.

Many platforms are today a part of social media. In the future they will be a part of ubiquitous media. Traditional media formats like TV, radio, video, game, film, magazine and newspaper are today facing new challenges of trans-media development. Already now many movies like “Year Zero” are trans-media projects. The new internet solutions and applications Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 will lead us to new kind of internet era. Especially for creative class and for journalism emerging trans-media is a big challenge, which changes work life and work culture.

Ubiquitous technology is not a neutral trend for societies. It will change many things, leading in an extreme form to technological singularity. As we know technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means, very probably resulting in explosive super intelligence. In this kind of techno society humans must develop new social positions, different from the positions of robots and super intelligent systems. We can expect that new kind of social and cultural structures will emerge.

Humans cannot compete with super intelligence, where already now new markets are in conditions of hyper-competition. Technology historically has fostered agility. Hyper-competition results from the dynamics of strategic maneuvering amongst competitors and from new technologies. Strategic maneuvering is more and more based on robotics and super intelligence. Many experts criticize these kinds of developments, especially in financial markets, where robotized gambling casinos without any rules (or not many rules) are possible to be run.

Many futurists say that it is very difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what a post-singularity world would be like. Raymond Kurzweil has discussed about this topic widely. However, we can expect that human beings must define their relationship to super intelligent systems and robots. Many complex ethical issues need answers.

The start of ubiquitous era means that we shall need new social innovations, which define new rules of societies. Also new business and technology innovations are needed to manage change in this kind of environment. We can also expect that the time of average is going to be over, because robots define the code of average from new technological pre-conditions. Accordingly, humans must re-define their positions from this novel perspective.
Ubiquitous technology development means also that the borders between real reality and virtual reality become vague. In real environments actual events, material substances and real places matter. In virtual environments virtual places, digital substances and autonomous events matter. The new trans-media emerges when these 6 key real and virtual elements will be linked by ubiquitous technologies and tech applications.

This is a future vision of global trans-media.

The trans-media includes both real and virtual elements. Authenticity will be a strategic key issue in the experience society, which is the next society after service economy. In the experience economy attention is scarce, time is limited and money is consumable. These are also the basic rules of trans-media.

There seems to be more questions than answers concerning our common future. Creative class members and especially bohemian persons are probably finding new answers more probably than the “average class”. One working hypothesis is that robots will destroy the “labor class” in the future. If this hypothesis holds, it means that population rich countries will face the era of mass employment. Also other smaller countries will have social and economic problems, because local and global markets do not work well. How much this process takes time, is another open question.

Humans have an obvious challenge: to be creative persons who find answers to open questions. People are forced to find the bohemian element of their minds.

As we know an alliance is an agreement or friendship between two or more parties, made in order to advance common goals and to secure common interests. Typically alliances are made in the fields of military, politics and business organizations. Typical alliances are between international airlines. Alliance is a way to gain novel competitive advantages in the business life. We can define them to be holy alliances, very conventional and popular organizations.

As we know from history there was a Holy Alliance between Russia, Austria and Prussia, created in 1815. In European international relations, the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, was signed in 1373 between the Kingdom of England and Portugal. This is the oldest international alliance in the world which is still in force. These holy alliances have made a difference in history, but even the most holy alliances tend to break down.

There are also other kinds of alliances: unholy alliances. These alliances are not so popular always. Often history writers forgot them. Unholy alliances are not so obvious organizations. Very often unholy alliances and “the usual suspects” or shadow organizations. Parties of these organizations are mixed and non-homogenous. These organizations and teams are occupied with rough personalities and typically with boho people with very special characters.

Many classical movies are based on the idea of an unholy alliance, where group of “aliens” and “monsters” make something “out of box”. As we movie fans know big jail breakouts are done by this kind of “dream teams”. Someone can call them “radical rebel alliances”. There is some wise and smart thinking behind these alien stories.

We know very well that each organization is different. Each organization must find its own way through the authentic process. Each will have a very specific goal. Each will have a different sense of social commitment. Each will have a different sub-culture. Each will have different barriers and different advantages. Shadow organizations are not bureaucratic organizations. The “shadow organization” is an informal organization, superimposed upon existing official organizations, consisting of active teams with names like steering committee, task force and action teams.

Today science is showing us that so called normal persons are not necessary the best people to question old truths. Today provocative thinking has become one of the most valuable assets. Radical thinkers are often presenting dangerous ideas and the holy alliances cannot do it easily because of group thinking problem and other socio-economic commitments. Shadow organization concept may help individual bohos to shock them into change by stepping out of their comfort zone.

If you are a part of a system, it is difficult to join the radical rebel alliance. For bohos joining the radical rebel “army” is more obvious solution than for senators of the parliaments or Fortune 500 leaders. Consensus builders have other targets than innovation leaders. Typically the real bohos are freedom fighters – but not pets of the consensus democracy. They are participants in a rebellion.

Even holy alliances need unholy alliances. Often a holy alliance is actually based on an unholy alliance. This is a paradox of our times. We can claim that when many development processes are accelerating, the need for unholy alliances is growing exponentially, and it is growing also fast.

First, there is a growing need for questioning many processes, which are too fast. Secondly, there is also growing need to apply new technological, social and business possibilities too. There is an endless frontier for development ahead, where unholy alliances can play a big role.